JARED BLAND - The Globe and Mail
Markus Dohle, the CEO of the newly merged Penguin Random House, looks like a cross between Aaron Eckhart and Jon Hamm. Which is also to say that he looks like a politician, a fitting resemblance as he commences his latest campaign, travelling the world to the many offices of Penguin and Random House as part of an effort toward, as he says, “transparency and connection and communication” within the new company. He is the most powerful publishing figure on the planet, but for now all he wants to do is talk. Talk to his people, to answer their questions about an uncertain new era. And talk to you, his reader.
Known as an operations specialist, the German-born Dohle was put in charge of Random House’s U.S. operations in 2008, prompting much fretting over whether a bean counter in charge would mean a diminishment of the romantic ideals that the business still cherishes. As Gawker snarked at the time, since he had “no obvious emotional attachment to high-minded writing per se, Dohle should be the ruthless numbers man [his predecessor] always fancied himself but could never actually become.”
The company he now heads, whose merger was finalized on Canada Day, has almost 250 separate publishing imprints, spanning five continents, many of which act as almost independent companies. It employs more than 10,000 people. It will publish 15,000 books each year. And it will all add up to revenue of $3.9-billion, controlling 25 per cent of the American trade-book market, and an even higher portion in Canada. To say it is the biggest publishing company in the world is somehow to undersell it, like pointing out that the Beatles had a few fans, or that pizza is sort of tasty. Its existence is a likely necessary response to an extremely volatile publishing landscape, and probably the first of other such large-scale consolidations to come.
Until recently, I worked as an editor at a mid-sized independent publishing house, witnessing first hand the state of normalized panic that has come to define so much of the industry. The rapidly changing market presents a number of complicated realities, but the basic outline of it is this: There are fewer bookstores, and will continue to be fewer bookstores; Amazon is dominant, and will likely continue to be dominant; bricks-and-mortar retail in Canada is overwhelmingly controlled by Indigo, a chain that, to protect its own business, has become increasingly forceful in adjusting the terms of the business it conducts with publishers in favour of its own interests; and literary coverage in newspapers and magazines, previously one of the primary ways consumers learned about new books, is in decline. Also, people are buying fewer books. And the “digital revolution,” which was to change everything and refresh drying revenue streams, has essentially plateaued here in Canada, stalled out at somewhere between 12 and 15 per cent of the market. Things, to put it mildly, are challenging.
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Known as an operations specialist, the German-born Dohle was put in charge of Random House’s U.S. operations in 2008, prompting much fretting over whether a bean counter in charge would mean a diminishment of the romantic ideals that the business still cherishes. As Gawker snarked at the time, since he had “no obvious emotional attachment to high-minded writing per se, Dohle should be the ruthless numbers man [his predecessor] always fancied himself but could never actually become.”
The company he now heads, whose merger was finalized on Canada Day, has almost 250 separate publishing imprints, spanning five continents, many of which act as almost independent companies. It employs more than 10,000 people. It will publish 15,000 books each year. And it will all add up to revenue of $3.9-billion, controlling 25 per cent of the American trade-book market, and an even higher portion in Canada. To say it is the biggest publishing company in the world is somehow to undersell it, like pointing out that the Beatles had a few fans, or that pizza is sort of tasty. Its existence is a likely necessary response to an extremely volatile publishing landscape, and probably the first of other such large-scale consolidations to come.
Until recently, I worked as an editor at a mid-sized independent publishing house, witnessing first hand the state of normalized panic that has come to define so much of the industry. The rapidly changing market presents a number of complicated realities, but the basic outline of it is this: There are fewer bookstores, and will continue to be fewer bookstores; Amazon is dominant, and will likely continue to be dominant; bricks-and-mortar retail in Canada is overwhelmingly controlled by Indigo, a chain that, to protect its own business, has become increasingly forceful in adjusting the terms of the business it conducts with publishers in favour of its own interests; and literary coverage in newspapers and magazines, previously one of the primary ways consumers learned about new books, is in decline. Also, people are buying fewer books. And the “digital revolution,” which was to change everything and refresh drying revenue streams, has essentially plateaued here in Canada, stalled out at somewhere between 12 and 15 per cent of the market. Things, to put it mildly, are challenging.
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